ANT labels a stable actor-network as a black box so its analysis may focus only on its inputs and outputs. Since a
black box is an actor-network then its stability is also influenced by all material involved. The black box could be
opened up and analyzed as an actor-network by tracing all its relevant actors and their relationship [21].
In opening up a “black box” of reality, ANT uses the notion of translation [22] to make sense why certain social
reality finally becomes stable unstable over time. Translation could be described as a process in which actors mobilizes
resources or another actor-network to form allies that result in a stabilized actor-network. Therefore, translation explores the
ways in which the networks of relations are composed, maintained, and made more durable over time. The translation
process involves four moments phases as follows [23]:
1 Problematization. In this moment, one or more key actors
define the nature of the problem and the roles of other actors to fit the proposed solution. The solution is offered
in such a way that all actors participated will be subjected to some centralised control mechanism labelled as an
“obligatory passage point OPP.” 2
Interessement. Here, all actors identified in the first phase are given specific roles and identities and the strategies that
need to be acted upon which will attract them. This attraction is the interessment device that will lead them to
the next phase.
3 Enrolment. The success of the strategies related to the
interessement device will result in the enrolment of actors to establish a stable network of alliance. However, the
stability of this alliance depends on the negotiation process to define their roles in the network.
4 Mobilization. Once the proposed solution gains wider
acceptance, then an even larger network of absent entities are created through some actors acting as spokespersons
for others.
III. R
ESERCH
M
ETHODOLOGY
Data used for this interpretive case study were gathered in 2009 to 2010 from two e-government projects in Indonesia.
Yogyakarta Cyber Province Initiative YCPI and Sragen One Stop Service Initiative SOSSI projects were selected. These
two projects are the appropriate cases since the first is considered as problematic but the second is a successful one.
Data gathered include factual numerical, textual, audio, and visual event. Data were collected by conducting some
observation at the two project sites, inspecting archival documents, browsing their websites, and recording semi
structured interviews. The interviews were conducted in local language and involved 22 and 15 personnels respectively. All
interview sessions lasted from 30 to 90 minutes. Recorded interviews were transcribed fully before they were analyzed
thematically. Twenty themes were used to code data and were developed mainly from ANT translation processes, e-
government development elements, and some related social issues such as prosperity, values and beliefs.
IV. C
ASE
D
ESCRIPTION
A. Case 1 : Yogyakarta Cyber Province Initiative YCPI
Realizing the potential contribution of ICT to improve the low quality of public services from the provincial
administration of Yogyakarta, YCPI aimed to promote a new model of managing province that would transform the way the
state government efficiently and effectively delivered its services to public. The model aimed to enable the provincial
government to serve public better and to speed-upexpedite the state development by intensively using ICT. To solve this
transformational problem, YCPI involved many actors. The
actors‟s roles, interest and conditions could better be described by a network of interests owned by each actor as presented in
Figure 1. This network may represent the fact that government transformation would only happen if an alliance occurs as
follows. a The head of various offices want to fully participate in government reform program to serve people
better; b Province Information Office PIO staffs are consistently willing to manage the implementation of YCPI;
c The Governor of Yogyakarta keeps wanting to serve people better; d ICT infrastructure functionally operates
well; e Team for Innovation and Change TiMPII is continuously supporting change initiatives; f Partnership for
Government Reform Organization wants to make governance reform successful.
Figure 1. Actor-Network of YCPI To solve the problems, YCPI involved six offices to
develop its own service of excellence as follows: 1
Education Office: To improve education quality through Yogyakarta learning gateway, regional digital library and
knowledge center network. 2
Industry and Commerce Office: To improve revenue and welfare of the society by enhancing commercial growth.
It is achieved by increasing access to global as well as
Stop supporting YCPI : Lack of financial
and legal support Threatening heads of
offices Obstacle:
Not to
participate
Do nothing BID
Office
Sultan Head
Offices
ICT Infrastr
TiMPII
The Partnership
OP
YCPI is successful
Serving people
better Serving
people
better
Function well
Successful government
reform
Governance reform is
successful
ACTORS GOALS
regional market and building SME Small Medium Enterprise business center.
3 Agriculture Office: To improve farmers‟ welfare through
agro-business programs by providing information on agro-business and market.
4 Transportation Office: To improve regional economic
activities through
the development
of a
good transportation services.
5 Tourism Office: To improve people‟s welfare and
competitiveness through tourism promotion. 6
Fishery Office: To facilitate the development of fishery community and their competitiveness.
Staffs of PIO expressed differently in perceiving the progress of YCPI ranging from being realistic to pessimistic.
Those who were realistic consider YCPI as a long term dream and it would automatically be successful as public‟s readiness
and demand increases over time. Those who were pessimistic argued that such similar initiatives had been introduced many
times long before the notion of e-government existed and had never been successful. One of PIO staffs who had been
actively involved in developing computer-based application for government sectors expressed his pessimistic stance by
having this to say:
“Though there are many small-scale IT applications that have been used to support government activities like
SIMPEG personnel records system, but after waiting for a long time many people keep questioning what the real
contributions to society of all these initiatives are?” Among the six services of excellence, only education and
commerce programs were considered moving to achieve their goals. The education service of excellence even received
support from Ministry of Communication and Information through a Japan-funded project to strengthen school ICT-
readiness by distributing computers and connecting school
computers to the province‟s library network. The industry and commerce service of excellence program managed to set up
and maintain the so-called Yogyakarta Business Service Center YBSC to help business community easily get support
from and exchange information with government agencies and business communities. This center offered several services to
SME Small Medium Enterprise in the form of advice, consultation, and training in the area of marketing,
management, ICT adoption, and partnering.
Although the Governor of Yogyakarta officially launched the Agricenter the service of excellent of Agriculture Office
on July 1st, 2009, less than one year later May 2010 Agricenter was down and could no longer be accessed. When
the staffs managing the website in Agriculture Office were interviewed, one of them explained thus:
“… honestly we have no competence to manage this. Now we have only one non-permanent staff who has ICT
background and we are still planning to hire one more staff
.” Meanwhile. the Transportation Office planned an
ambitious transportation information system by integrating it with IP-based digital camera installed in some crowded main
road in Yogayakarta. The system was projected to provide real time vehicles traffic situation in some main roads in down
town Yogyakarta. Unfortunately, until March 2010 the transportation
information systems
had never
been implemented. The head of Transportation Office explained
why its service of excellence could not be successfully implemented as follows:
“Obstacles from our office to implement our service of excellence include low understanding, readiness and
commitment of our staffs. We also face organizational and financial problems. Besides, I think for the last 4
years of implementing YCPI, the even bigger problems were found in the provincial level
…” The tourism service of excellence program has been
developing a good website to promote tourism in Yogyakarta. The website published information on some tourist destination
sites, hotels, events, and the tourism activities. It also published news related to tourism and tourism office activities.
Unfortunately, the website was written only in the Indonesian language with which many foreigners were disappointed and
felt cheated since the name of the website was in English www.visitingjogja.com. Though the published information was
very interesting and could help tourists when visiting Yogyakarta, they were neither accurate nor complete as
reflected by many visitors‟ complaints in its guest book. A promising result from fishery service of excellence was
the development of Fishery Business Center. It was a website http:fbc.perikanan-diy.infohome.php to effectively connect
buyers and suppliers of fish products. Buyers could easily distribute their demand via SMS Short Messaging Systems
to Fishery Office that subsequently distributed them to all registered suppliers. Conversely, anytime a supplier could
send information about their available products by sending massage to Fishery Office that will forward it to all registered
buyers. Although the initiative was in line with the formulated service of excellence from Fishery Office, the number of users
of this facility was very limited. As of March 2010, there were less than 20 registered suppliers and less than 15 registered
buyers. More importantly, the recorded activities of selling and buying fishery products were limited and were not done
daily.
Not only did those implementation failures affect YCPI performance, but the introduction of government regulation
No. 41 2007 also made YCPI uncertain. This regulation that limits the number of offices in the province as well as in local
administration level had eventually been used to dissolve the existence of PIO and was finally reduced into just a section of
the Transportation and Communication Office.
B. Case 2: Sragen One Stop Service Initiative SOSSI
The main idea of establishing SOSSI was very simple but fundamental, namely how local administration of Sragen
regency fulfilled its mandate to better serve public license inquiry by providing simple, transparent, accountable, and
one-stop service. This new kind of service tried to replace the common practice of government service where citizens had to
undergo complicated and unclear process as passing through several different office red-tapes. Using this idea, the local
administration of Sragen tried to implement not only an effective and efficient government administration but also a
new paradigm of work culture that focused on treating citizens
as government‟s customers. The most crucial part in establishing SOSSI was to get
support from various heads of offices who were currently holding authority to issue licenses. It was common that not
only the head office but also some lower-level government staffs
abused “power” and authority to manage, control, and complicate the issuance of licenses for their personal benefits.
Another problem was how to efficiently run the one-door service just like a private entity. To manage this situation, the
head of Sragen regency the “Bupati” conducted many
meetings to promote, explain and solicit support by involving related heads of offices, some important personnel from his
own office and other local legislative bodies. He then problematized the establishment of SOSSI by defining the
roles of each involved actor. Figure 2 provides the description of the roles and relationship of some important actors involved
in the problematization process. This description precisely portrays that the establishment of this one stop service
involved complex actor-network of heterogeneous elements.
Figure 2: The Problematization Network of SOSSI The Bupati attempted to influence and stabilize all the
actors he defined in the previous step by introducing several attractive
programs. These
programs extended
and materialized the hypothesis he made concerning the success of
SOSSI which include the following: a License inquiry should be simple, fast, and transparent,
b Offices involved should support the new process of delivering licenses by returning its authority back to
Bupati, c SOSSI staffs could be transformed to become professional
workers, d ICT and private sector practice could be fully adopted,
e Excellent license services would attract more investors. Using these hypotheses, Bupati implemented three new
important interessement devices which are: a
Granting SOSSI unit an authority to issue licenses after retracting that authority from various offices.
b Facilitating SOSSI to adopt corporate work culture and
management equipped with new reward system. c
Providing incentives to members of the business community who wants to initiate operation in Sragen.
Some indicators could be attributed to account for the success of SOSSI. From the citizens‟ point of view, the
simple, transparent, and accountable services are found satisfactory for them. Based on service satisfaction survey
with 150 respondents conducted twice a year, the customer satisfaction index increased from year to year. On the last two
surveys, the customer satisfaction index scored 83.995 and 84.005 respectively. One customer who was also an
entrepreneur justified SOSSI performance by saying thus:
“This SOSSI is very beneficial for business since I always get help whenever I apply a business license. To get a
business license I do not have to wait for a long time, I am provided with convenience facilities and served
excellently by SOSSI staffs. Based on my experience, I just needed less than one week to get license to start my
business.” From
some government
and non-government
organizations‟ point of view, SOSSI has also been considered as a good model of a quality public service provider. It did
not come as a surprise that SOSSI then obtained some recognition from different parties starting from non-
government organization, local government nation-wide, to the president of Indonesia. Moreover, the central government
of Indonesia had chosen SOSSI as the best practice public service agency in Indonesia and encouraged other local
governments to use it as a model. Consequently, many times Sragen had been appointed by the central government to be
the consultant in developing some government stipulations on public services. Sragen was also consulted by Indonesian
Commission on Anti-Corruption because the way SOSSI promoted transparency was reportedly able to minimize
corruption practices.
From the Sragen local government point of view, SOSSI was indeed something to be proud of. Now, local government
and people of Sragen were so proud of having at least two visitors coming to SOSSI every day doing comparative
studies. Being proud as a model of service excellence, staffs in
Do not care Lack of resources
Against to reform Do not cooperate
Resist to change Obstacle
Against license authority delegation
Bupati
Head s
SOSS I staffs
IT Infrastr Stipulation
s PDE
Citizens
OPP
Attract more investors
Support authority
delegation Change the
working habits Facilitate
license Align with
reform
initiative
Cooperate to develop
and Get license
easier, simpler
ACTORS GOALS
Visitors Appreciate SOSS
Stop coming to SOSS
SOSSI eventually instilled their confident that they were able to contribute good things not only to the people of Sragen but
to people and government of Indonesia at large. This kind of accomplishment also happened particularly every time Sragen
was invited by other local governments to help the establishment of similar services. Staffs of SOSSI now started
believing that employing new paradigm of work to serve public and not to be served was really meaningful and
rewarding.
From the economic point of view, SOSSI has managed to directly and indirectly increase revenue and investment to
local government. In 2002 Sragen‟s revenue was only IDR 22.56 billion but in 2006 it rose to IDR 72.77 billion.
